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Principal Is Accused of Inflating Attendance to Aid Career

The principal of an Upper West Side high school who achieved prominence for her ability to improve attendance did so by padding attendance figures, pressuring her staff to include truants and dropouts on the rolls and creating ''phantom classes,'' the special investigator for New York City public schools said yesterday.

Edward F. Stancik, the special investigator, charged that the principal, Marlene Lazar, inflated enrollment and attendance figures from 1990, when she was appointed principal of Louis D. Brandeis High School, to 1998, when she was removed, and did so to better her career. Attendance records of the school's more than 2,000 students were exaggerated up to 12 percent each month, Mr. Stancik said.

''Brandeis's impressive numbers boosted Lazar's career considerably,'' Mr. Stancik wrote. He added, ''Having built a formidable reputation in large part based on her attendance 'initiatives,' Lazar's request for early tenure was granted.''

Although a state commission in December found attendance fraud throughout the system, Mr. Stancik's report yesterday provided a detailed case history of how it might have occurred at one school.

Ms. Lazar, who is paid $89,931 a year, was reassigned to the Manhattan high school superintendent's office when the investigation began in 1998. She did not return phone calls yesterday. A copy of the report has been sent to the Manhattan district attorney's office, Mr. Stancik said.

Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy said that he had read the report and was ''going to be ruthless about it.'' He expressed concern about how Brandeis might have cheated other schools out of classroom teachers.

''What's important to understand is there's no one who got any personal benefit out of it,'' Mr. Levy said. ''That's not an excuse. We can't have people giving in false reports.''

Mr. Stancik's 51-page report maintained that Ms. Lazar began inflating attendance and enrollment figures soon after she arrived at the school, though it focused mostly on the spring of 1997.

Relying heavily on Hal Charney, chief of computer support services, Mr. Stancik said, Ms. Lazar directed the altering of attendance sheets submitted by teachers. If too many absences were recorded for the school as a whole toward the end of the month, Mr. Charney would run a computer program that changed them to present or late to match Ms. Lazar's expectations.

In one month, Brandeis's attendance was inflated by 164 names, according to the report. The names were also listed as students in 20 nonexistent classes. For every 19 enrolled students, Brandeis was eligible for an additional teacher, allowing the school to gain eight teaching slots, the report said.

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The inflated attendance and enrollment figures, Mr. Stancik charged, brought little money to the school but allowed Ms. Lazar to assemble a ''small army of administrators who spent little time teaching.''

Sixty-three of the school's 163 teachers held jobs outside the classroom, including 14 deans, 14 grade advisers and 22 assorted coordinators, Mr. Stancik wrote. The positions, considered perks, included program heads and cafeteria monitors, the report shows. Many taught only two periods a day; some taught only one period.

As a result, Brandeis had a low ratio of teacher time spent on instruction, the report said. The citywide average in fall 1997 was 87.3 percent, compared with 78.3 percent at Brandeis. Class size pushed to about 34 students, the maximum permitted by the Board of Education.

Many students in the phantom classes were enrolled through a program called Project Drop-In, which was set up to retrieve dropouts. Mr. Stancik's office interviewed 25 of 104 young people who were named in Project Drop-In records. Few had heard of the program or had been to Brandeis after dropping out.

Sixty chronic dropouts, the report shows, should have been dropped from Brandeis's register, but they were placed in 15 phantom classes in the spring 1997 term.

The report included one student who dropped out in December 1995 to give birth to twins. She was listed as re-enrolled but never returned, deciding to stay home to care for her children, the report said.

Another student told investigators he was in jail at times when he was reported present.

The attendance system the Board of Education used until this year automatically presumed students were present unless they were marked absent on scan sheets, which were fed into computers that tabulate daily systemwide attendance. Mr. Stancik's report lambasted the board for maintaining such a flawed system.

Board officials responded that state education policy required them to take attendance that way. In light of the criticism, the board has increased monitoring. In February, the high school attendance system was replaced to match those at the elementary and middle school levels, which require each teacher to sign attendance sheets.

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A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2000, on Page B00003 of the National edition with the headline: Principal Is Accused of Inflating Attendance to Aid Career. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe